Navigation

Tag Archives | Blogging

ecto and SOHO Notes it is then

By on December 10, 2006 in General

I wrote previously that I was testing MacJounal as a replacement for ecto as a blog tool and SOHO Notes as a personal journal app. Whilst MacJounal has some nice touches, and does have a nice Mac interface, I’ve reverted to ecto and SOHO Notes for the two tasks respectively. I really missed being able to drag a picture into a blog entry window in ecto and have a thumbnail automatically created that linked to a full size version when uploaded to my Soapbox. I also like the ability to specify a target when creating links. On the SOHO Notes front I like the way it automatically enters the current date as the title of a note when you create one in the in built Journal folder. Hardly Earth shattering I know but the small touches are nice.

Site update

By on November 28, 2006 in General

You may have noticed that I’ve changed the theme in use by WordPress for the Soapbox. The new one is based on Man~ja. I want to change the colours of the entry headers to blue and the colours of the links in posts to a different colour as well. I’d also like to change the Posted by… text to a different colour as well. However no matter what changes I make to the style.css file the colours won’t change. I’ll sort it out later! I like the new theme. I think it is cleaner than the previous one. A few more tweaks and I’ll be happy.

UPDATE: Looks like the colour changes I made to the CSS file are working today. I think the blue is a bit bright so I’ve changed it to be Dark Blue (#00008B). I think the style sheet must be getting cached somewhere between me and the Gradwell servers. So I’ll see tomorrow, after the cache has expired, how the new colours look.

Testing MacJournal again

By on November 26, 2006 in General

I’m having another look at MacJournal to see if it’ll work as my personal diary tool and also as a blog editing tool. I’m writing this entry using v4.1d4, which is the latest available development build from Dan Schimpf. The editor is nice. Probably a bit better than ecto form a Macintosh GUI perspective.

I was able to download all 190 entries from my Soapbox okay after pointing it at the base URL. When I tried this in a previous version it only downloaded a subset of them. Not sure if that was as result of something I did wrong or the program itself.

In theory I should be able to use this one program to compose and store both personal entries and public entries for the Soapbox. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll be before a private entry gets posted here 🙂

Here is a screen grab of this entry being composed in MacJournal. If picture uploading is working then you’ll be able to see it. If not I’ll need to do some more tweaking!

MacJournalSmall.jpg
Click on picture for larger view

Update: Obviously pictures are being scaled to fit the column width. Have to fix that. Three options:

        • Find out if MacJournal can mimic the behaviour of ecto. The latter will include a thumbnail of the image in the post and will display the image in a new window when it’s double clicked. This would be my preference for a fix.
        • Amend the CSS templates for the WordPress theme to stop images being scaled. If anyone knows how to do this post in the comments.
        • Change the WordPress scheme to not use a single centred column. Might be time to go to a normal full window width theme anyway.

Update 2: The images are okay in the RSS feed from the site. Which is how everyone reads blogs anyway! Right?

Update 3: I’ve edited the picture to make it a thumbnail with a link to the larger version.